Alias Maya 7

[Cora Auch]

Imade a class A model in Alias and now I am importing it into Maya. I saved the model as a wire file from alias and then I am importing the same wire file into Maya through studioimport plug in. I have my layers and everything. But when you the image I have shared, The model is not accurate. It should be aligned and proportionate with its green edges i.e. the way I created it in Alias (smooth and exact).

It looks like NURBS tesslation issue. Is this a poly object or NURBS object? It looks like it ignored the smoothing of the curve/line made a linier surface. I need some more info, If you right click on it what you see VERTEX or CONTROL vertex? I have no exp in Alias but I know that they are NURBS based.

Actually I understood the process. But the fact is that an A class alias model needs to be converted to Maya polygons for further detailing and texturing. And that destroys the true class A quality of the Alias model. So for vfx and games point, I think it is wiser to try modelling at the best quality in maya itself instead of relating nurbs and polygon models. In my attempt to convert the alias model into polygons, all I found was degradation in the quality of the surface with so many spans and poly faces in maya. So in a nutshell, its better for me not to merge class A (Nurbs) with Polygons. Thats how i fixed my approach in this situation. Let them be champions in their own ways..

Hello again, i want to open this topic for all advanced Rhino user and possibly some of you that uses other 3d software package such as 3dsmax and maya.

Since there is no way we can compare Rhino and 3dsmax (obviously 3ds is based on poly modelling and Rhino is NURBS), there is another 3d Beast that i like to compare with Rhino , which is MAYA.

This comparison is not trying to judge which software is better, but I want to know the advantage and disadvantage of using Rhino and Maya, based on your experience working in architecture project and product design. And possible finding a workflow that can connect both rhino and Maya.

Ill start from my own opinion

Just recently i watched some video interview about ZAHA HADID ARCHITECT (almost all architect know this lady, she has produced one of the most spectacular architecture in the modern world, and her works really is a good example on how to utilise advanced 3d software into architectural design). On one of the interview, zaha hadid mention that her design team uses MAYA to experiment in the early design, since MAYA can use both NURBS and Polygon, it is perhaps the bridge that combine Rhino NURBS and 3dsmax poly into 1 single unified software. Not to mention MAYA is highly customized and it has node-based generative modelling similar to grasshopper (however u need to be very good at scripting, unlike GH which u have all the component prepared for u).

i then tried MAYA for 30 days and to be honest i am amazed by it., that software is totally geared towards design. It has direct button to convert NURBS to poly. And u know it already, poly is the easiest to tweak and play around since it works abit like clay. And MAYA also have sculpting brushes like Zbrush to make it even more powerful for designer to experiment with their geometry.

One thing to mention, is that MAYA has a very limited NURBS tool, it can do alright for creating NURBS object, rebuilding surface and curve but it doesnt have all the awesome surface analysis tool that rhino does simply i think because MAYA developer doesnt want to make the software too complicated. As long as it is good enough for design purposes, it will stay that way.

Since most of you here are expert RHINO users, i want to know if you have tried MAYA or perhaps uses MAYA in conjunction with RHINO as part of your workflow? Does MAYA python scripting provide more control than RHINO grasshopper? Or RHINO grasshopper is still the best generative modelling compared to MAYA? How good are these 2 software can be used together? How compatible is MAYA to rhino?

I have seen Maya over the years and played around with it some. Maya is very much about animation at its core and hence is not in the same group as Rhino. One thing that makes Maya difficult for exterior or interior work is the way it does not use inches or meters but a generic unit system. That may have changed but I doubt it. You could not do dimension drawings in Maya. Maya is not as flexible with altering a design as Rhino. You could do a fantastic animation of the Falling Water house with the waterfall working in maya though.

Yes, rhino is using NURBS algoritm for that reason we dont have to worry about the resolution when manufacturing, polygon however, depending on the resolution to achieve a smooth curvature. Since any modelling in 3dsmax or maya needs to be redone in other CAD software, (revit) , anything done in that software should only be for visualization, nothing more.

For those who commented about zaha hadid, yes she also use rhino and revit and she also uses gehry bim method as well. But on the interview, zaha said she praises MAYA because for its flexibility when doing concept design. (I believe she use MAYA mel or python script to extend its uses) may I know if you guys know what kind of workflow she uses in MAYA and how does she incorporate that in rhino?is parametric panelling (for instance) is something that we can only do in Rhino?

I think this conversation will never end. @Runnie you want to compare two different software but you have not specified what you want to achieve. What is the final product? Do you have any examples? Conceptual design? Rationalising geometry?

I know people at Zaha use both Maya/Rhino-GH to design their buildings and products. I know they also use T-Splines. So to make it clear they use everything, because no tool does everything they need.

On February 1, AliasWavefront is beginning to ship their latest animation software, Maya and Maya Artisan. Maya runs on Silicon Graphics hardware with R4000 or higher processor, 24-bit graphics and OpenGL native preferred. Maya will perform significantly better on current generation hardware, i.e. Silicon Graphics O2 and Octane. Sometime after it will run on Wintel/NT, as well as the forthcoming SGI "Visual PC."

AliasWavefront's position and ubiquity in the high-end animation market responded to customers needs by listening and designing for their production paradigm. Their aggressive technology agenda and desire for character animation lead to opening up the tools even more so than Power Animator or Dynamation. On first impression, Maya seems like the amalgamation of TDI's Explore, Wavefront's Kinemation and Dynamation, as well as Alias PowerAnimator. Many of the familiar features are there, but the salient point of Maya is the ability to remap relationships on the fly. The system architecture was written from the ground up for maximum performance. There is no longer 1980s legacy code that hampers development or simple features like a universal undo.

Three main architectural components of Maya are the Dependency Graph, MEL scripting and a C++ API. The dependency graph can be distilled to nodes with attributes that are connected. The power of this is the artist's ability to reconnect or remap relationships on the fly. This permits features like animatible construction history or using surface normals to be generated by an entirely unrelated animation. I find this alone brimming with creative challenges. The next most accessible feature is MEL scripting. MEL stands for Maya Embedded Language. It is the command and scripting language that can be utilized for creating a custom UI or repetitive set of commands. I come from an artistic background and see its usefulness but won't get into it as deep as a TD (Technical Director) would. The Maya C++ API permits Plug-in or custom development for proprietary tools.

AliasWavefront has developed Maya with two in-house productions. One is Ruby's Saloon done by the in-house development team and expert users. The other project slated to be completed by April for SIGGRAPH submission is Bingo, directed by the Oscar-nominated Chris Landreth (The End). He has recorded Greg Kotis' Disregard This Play from the Neo-Futurists Theater company and will lead a team on demonstrating Maya's capabilities. The clown image shows a new level of naturalistic human representation that Landreth has pursued in his art.

A small group of beta sites, including this author, have been participating in the Maya Development Partners Team. Based on a great deal of beta testing and resulting input, Maya has been through a lot of changes which has resulted in a delay of introduction. However, the stability and changes were worth the wait. Contrary to the beta agreement a great deal of production work has already been done. Dan DeLeeuw of Dream Quest Images is using Maya for the forthcoming Mighty Joe Young. Derald Hunt is currently animating Adventures of Spiderman, a Universal theme park project, using MEL scripting to animate easily Octo's extendible arms and hands. Daniel Hornick and Rob Aitcheson, formerly of AliasWavefront, can open up 160,000 frames of motion-capture data and deal with the complete skeletal hierarchy. This would choke any system currently available. Loren Olsen from Rhonda Graphics presented a commercial that involved a very heavy model of the complete city of Phoenix and was able to manipulate it, shading it, in real-time. Rhonda Graphics' spot, Running Scared, for golf company Ping used particles as sprites of grass while a hole eluded the golf ball. Maya production work has also been broadcast on Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict.

The second most significant product AliasWavefront has introduced is the supremely cool Artisan. This advanced module of Maya permits artists to sculpt with brushes and tools much easier than the tedious pushing and pulling of CVs (Control Vertices). The tools can be used with a tablet or a mouse. In many ways, this gives greater leverage to an artist's ability to draw or sculpt, not to the true techie. The key tools are the sculpt surfaces, paint select CVs, paint weights and MEL script painting tools. The artist is given a circle with a normal to the surface and paints on the actual surface geometry picking CVs and modifying them. The sculpt surface tool pushes or pulls the surface based on the brush settings. The key distinction is that this is not a texture or displacement map but the actual surface. Paint select CVs are the 3-D equivalent of a lasso pick, like in Adobe's Photoshop. Painting weights permit cluster (CV groups) weights on geometry. An example would be: a cape on a character could be set to a heavy weight on the shoulders and a lighter setting at the edges. A wind force would blow the cape by using softbody dynamics whose animation would transfer to the weighted clusters. The real mind-blower is script painting which allows MEL scripts to make custom results. A piece of geometry can be captured and emitted from the brush, for instance, buildings for a city or variable sized trees.

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